The security of today's networks has become increasingly important in the presence of growing technological complexity and heightened threats that can disrupt business and cause downtime. In order to secure and protect an organization's network and its connected resources, users are authenticated at the point of network attachment before allowing access to the network. Policy servers may be used, for example, to create and enforce network access policies for clients, connection request authentication, and connection request authorization. In conventional security systems, the authorization is static and any changes result in reauthentication, which impacts network processing and bandwidth resources.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.